The Game of Stakeholder Engagement

 

As many of my regular readers know, I view much of what passes for modern management science as being eerily similar to games, games that follow the predictable patterns examined in the field of game theory. Stakeholder management is no exception, but it has to be viewed from a certain angle to gain insight as to its patterns of success and failure. I know my last few blogs have been, umm, challenging (shall we say?) contemporary concepts of stakeholder management, but I have, believe it or not, performed some new scholarship on the matter which may help in certain circumstances.

Let’s begin with the precept that much of management is an information game. As long as the information streams are accurate, timely, and (most importantly) relevant, then the 20% poorest managers with 80% of the information they need to obviate a given decision will always out-perform the 80^th percentile best managers who have access to only 20% of what they need to know to ensure the correct decisions. This is where arrogance and stakeholder engagement enter into the equation. While arrogance as a personal trait is highly off-putting, in management it is fatal, since the arrogant manager does not believe himself to be error-prone, meaning that he will tend to not put in the extra effort to gain access to the data needed to make truly informed decisions. He begins to believe of himself that his hunches and instincts are suitable stand-ins for relevant information and, from that moment on, the projects he heads see their odds of a successful completion plummet.

From a third person perspective, though, this must appear as if the arrogant PM simply refuses to engage the people around him who may have the perspectives or insights necessary to complete the project(s) successfully. This tendency becomes clear if we engage in a little thought exercise: consider two PMs. One heads a project team of diverse personnel, who tend to approach problems in a wide variety of ways, ways that this PM would not normally engage as he pursues his scope. However, no one in this team has bothered to set up the management information systems (MISs) that collect, process, and deliver project performance data, or any other relevant data, for that matter. Project Manager B, by contrast, heads a project team of middle-age women, all of Irish descent, all with degrees from the same university, in the same subject, and are all married to men from Hawaii. Their kids attend the same school, and they are all fans of the same NFL team (the Atlanta Falcons). However, this project team has set up the MISs that provide accurate, timely, and relevant project information, including earned value and critical path methodology-based systems, as well as data relevant to the technology inherent in accomplishing the project’s scope. Which project team has the better chance of completing the project on-time, on-budget?

Now, to extend this little exercise a bit further, also imagine that project manager A is fully engaged with his team, and meets with them extensively. Is his lot improved? Imagine project manager B does not meet with her team at all – they simply (and literally) throw their reports over the transom to her door, and sneak off back to their cubicles. Have her chances of success been diminished?

I believe the management pathologies that have been identified by the stakeholder-engagement aficionados have, at their root, the twin evils of arrogance in executives and managers, and deficiencies in the delivery of accurate, timely, and relevant management information. I further believe that the techniques these well-intentioned ones push forward are actually remedies from the realm of organizational behavior and performance, designed to correct a pathology that actually originates in the information technology realm. Such cross-discipline remedies rarely work, however, and tend to come across like so much eat-your-peas-style hectoring.

Or, perhaps, I’ve arrived at these conclusions simply because I haven’t “engaged” the right “stakeholders.”